Earth Protect Blog

A demoralized workforce watching as its agency is dismantled by the very people charged to lead it: That is the grim state of affairs depicted by John J. O’Grady, a longtime employee in the Chicago field office of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is tasked with protecting the nation’s air ...

As part of President Trump's executive order to review "job-killing regulations," the Environmental Protection Agency last month asked for the public's input on what to streamline or cut. It held a series of open-mic meetings and set up a website that has received more than 28,000 comments, many of ...

The head of the environmental justice program at the Environmental Protection Agency has stepped down, departing the government with a lengthy letter to Scott Pruitt, the EPA's new administrator, urging him not to kill the agency's programs.
Mustafa Ali, a senior adviser and a...

Thousands of Americans continued to protest in North Dakota Saturday to demand the federal government stop the construction of an oil pipeline near Native American land. The Department of Justice is currently reviewing the case after a federal judge denied the tribes’ request to stop const...

Water scarcity has long been a problem. But climate change, a growing global population and economic growth are putting the natural resource under even more stress.
Brown with rust two ships stand like stone upright in the yellow sand. The wind swirls salty air around the the trawlers, silence ...

Students at nearly half the public school buildings in Newark, New Jersey, have been drinking bottled water for the last month, ever since public officials disclosed that the water from drinking fountains and faucets contained high levels of lead. Just last week, the school district released a ...

The events in the past few years in Michigan, culminating in a public health disaster, have finally turned a public spotlight on what has been happening in my home state.
Perhaps it’s where we are in history that these events have been not only uncovered, but broadcast electronically...

The rainfall and snowpack so far this autumn have been encouraging, but the stubborn reality is that California is still mired in drought. While farmers from Bakersfield to Fresno to Redding are screaming about water quotas, California residents say they are doing what they can, from pulli...

A California company is trying to crowdfund $10m to part-fund the building of the US' largest solar desalination project.
California-based WaterFX announced that it would be financing a third of the project using Californian Direct Public Offering (DPO) shares in an attempt to create the largest so...

“Catastrophe!” read the local headlines after 3 million gallons of metal-laden muck spilled into Colorado’s Animas River earlier last month.
The spill forced the city of Durango to close its drinking water intake, and local business that depend on the river were shut down for weeks. The spill trave...

Looking for water to flush his toilet, Tino Lozano pointed a garden hose at some buckets in the bare dirt of his yard. It's his daily ritual now in a community built by refugees from Oklahoma's Dust Bowl. But only a trickle came out; then a drip, then nothing more.
"There it goes," said Lozano, a 4...

Last year at this time, the toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie caused nearly half a million people in and around Toledo, Ohio, to be without safe drinking water. Clean water from our taps is something that many of us take for granted, but if we don’t protect our water sources — like the residents o...

As water shortages grip California and the seven state Colorado River basin, many users feel no pain, while some face a complete curtailment. That’s because the water management system is not designed to be either efficient or equitable but consistent and predictable. And it is.
As is typ...

EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finalized the Clean Water Rule to clearly protect the streams and wetlands that form the foundation of the nation’s water resources. Protection for many of the nation’s streams and wetlands has been confusing, complex, and time-consuming as the result of Supr...

Independence Day is one of block parties, barbecues, icy cold drinks, sparklers, noisemakers, fireworks, and therefore, a ton of trash. Here are a couple things to keep in mind before, during, and after your July 4th fun:
1. If you are going out in the wilderness, to a parade, or off to the beach, ...

Japan on Monday started work on an underground ice wall at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, freezing the soil under broken reactors to slow the build-up of radioactive water, officials said.
The wall is intended to block groundwater from nearby hillsides that has been flowing under the plant a...

Clean water is life’s most basic need, yet one in eight people of the world’s population do not have access to it. In Cambodia, a country of 14.8 million, there are over 9,000,000 cases of diarrhea. Bad water accounts for 13% of the deaths and 14.8% of the health burden. Without a better water sourc...

When it comes to our water footprint, the majority of us think that it’s just made up of the water that we drink and use to wash with, when actually this far from the case – only making up roughly 5% of our overall consumption. It may sound surprising but the other 95% of our water footprint, is ind...

The end of the rainy season is nearly here, and California faces a long, dry summer with a Sierra snowpack that is only 33% of normal. There is no significant precipitation in the forecast for California through April 25, but the state still has another shot at a decent round of heavy precipitation ...

For more than 20 years, countries across the globe have observed World Water Day on March 22 to draw attention to the precious nature of the world's water supply.
To mark World Water Day, the United Nations is highlighting the key role that water and energy play in economic development an...